Question 1

How much does a custom LMS cost?

Accepted Answer

From $3,000 to $15,000 USD, or A$4,500 to A$22,000. The deciding factor is assessment complexity and whether you need live cohorts. Recorded courses with quizzes sit near the bottom. Live classes, drip-released modules, graded assignments, and multiple instructor roles with revenue sharing push it up. We will also price a Moodle or LearnDash setup as a comparison, because sometimes that is genuinely the better answer.

Question 2

Should we use Moodle, Teachable or build custom?

Accepted Answer

If you are selling standard recorded courses, use an existing platform. It will be live in weeks and cost a fraction of a custom build. Custom makes sense when your teaching method does not fit the template: competency-based progression, integration with your own student records, or a certification process you must control. We have talked clients out of custom builds more than once, and we would rather do that than take money for something that will not fit.

Question 3

Where do videos get hosted?

Accepted Answer

Not on the same server as the website. Video serving needs different infrastructure, and hosting it yourself gets expensive fast once a hundred students watch simultaneously. We use Mux, Vimeo or Bunny Stream, all of which provide signed playback URLs so a student cannot copy a link and share it. That still does not stop screen recording, and no platform does, so price your content with that in mind.

Question 4

Can it handle live classes and cohorts?

Accepted Answer

Yes, usually by integrating rather than rebuilding. Zoom or Google Meet handles the video, and the LMS handles scheduling, attendance, recordings and cohort-level progress. Building video conferencing from scratch is not something we would recommend to anyone. Attendance tracking from Zoom works well; from Google Meet it is more limited, and we will tell you which before you choose.

Question 5

How long does an LMS take to build?

Accepted Answer

Eight to sixteen weeks for a custom platform. Content migration is often the longest phase, because years of slides, PDFs and videos need reorganising before they work in a structured course. If you already have clean content in a standard format, the build is faster. If the content lives in someone's Dropbox as 400 unlabelled files, budget weeks for that alone.

Question 6

Who owns the platform, the content and the student data?

Accepted Answer

You own all three. The code, the course material and the student records belong to you, and we will export the database in a documented format if you ever move. Student data is personal data, so we build with access controls, audit logs and a retention policy that matches your privacy obligations. We do not use your student list for anything of our own.

Question 7

What are the ongoing running costs, and what happens after launch?

Accepted Answer

Hosting is modest for a content platform, usually $30 to $200 USD a month. Video bandwidth is the variable that surprises people: a popular course with long videos can cost several hundred dollars a month on its own. Ninety days of defect support is included from launch, covering broken enrolments, quiz scoring errors and payment mismatches. New features and integrations are quoted separately, and we run a short session with your admin team on publishing courses and reading progress reports.

LMS & e-learning platform